Competitive Running Benefits

By running competitively one can increase the capacity of their brain; running boosts one’s ability to learn and has been known to help people to be able to focus better. Competitive running has extremely good benefits on the cognitive abilities of people who take part in the sport. Scientists studying the effects or running on cognitive abilities have found that competitive runners outperformed recreational runners in the abilities requiring motor inhibition, competitive runners were also found to be better at multitasking, and successfully ignoring information that was not necessarily relevant. Competitive running is shown to have bigger impacts on the brain than recreational running; as this may be true, running in general has still been

In another Runner's World article there shedding of light on what running can do to help one’s brain. The first brain booster provided by running is that running helps your brain grow by stimulating the creation of new nerve cells and blood vessels. Another point made in this article is that running helps the brain age better. “ A study last year measured neural markers and cognitive function in middle-aged athletes and non-athletes, and while the cognitive function scores were the same, researchers found the athletes' brains showed greater metabolic efficiency and neural plasticity” (5 Ways Running Boosts Brain Power). Running also boosts one’s ability to learn, running has been known to help people to be able to focus better. Running also helps with memory and runners tend to do better on tests. By running one can condition their brain to hold more fuel, helping with cognitive function. The last major benefit of running is the fact that running helps keep one’s brain full of feel-good chemicals. “... like many antidepressant medications, running helps your brain hold on to mood-boosting neurotransmitters serotonin and norepinephrine” (5 Ways Running Boosts Brain Power). There are connections between the fact that both dancing and running benefit the brain. Running tends to help with memory retaining and cognitive abilities, where dancing mainly helps with balance, so even though the two activities are good for the brain there are definitely some differences between the way the brain adapts to these brain changes. An article in Psychology Today, by Christopher Bergland quotes Dr. Seemungal, saying “It’s not useful for a ballet dancer to feel dizzy or off balance. Their brains adapt over years of training to suppress that input. Consequently, the signal going to the brain areas responsible for perception of dizziness in the cerebral cortex is reduced, making dancers resistant to feeling dizzy. If we can target that same